Free Republic

Snow drifting all the way to the top of the powerlines, haven't seen this since I was a kid.

Filmmaker Richard Donner, who helped create the modern superhero blockbuster with 1978’s “Superman” and mastered the buddy comedy with the “Lethal Weapon” franchise, has died. He was 91. Donner died Monday in Los Angeles, his family said through a spokesperson. Donner gained fame with his first feature, 1976’s “The Omen.” A then-unheard-of offer followed: $1 million to direct 1978’s “Superman.” Donner channeled his love of the character into making the film, repeatedly facing off with producers over the need for special effects that would convince the audience that a superhero could really fly. In the title role, Donner cast Christopher...

WHEN Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills and junk mail was a letter addressing him as “ugly dog”. It told him he would soon be beheaded. It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker.

From S. Stephen Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, 1987, 65-66: Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, and CounterspyPhilip Agee and Victor Marchetti, along with members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, launched the journal CounterSpy, under the aegis of the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5). OC-5 stated that its purpose was to develop an "alternative intelligence community. . .with the flexibility of employing both revolutionary and reformist methods. In an early CounterSpy article, "Exposing the CIA", Agree spelled out the OC-5 program: "The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA...

<p>Gary Bowyer, an archaeologist with the BLM out of Carson City, and Dana McGowan, from Sacramento, use screens to separate dirt from possible artifacts Tuesday at the site where it is believed members of the Donner Party camped during the winter of 1846.</p>